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Enterprise success will not move to wider society until industry standards are agreed

ORLANDO: The Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices will help revolutionise industry in the next five years, but will have little impact on the general public for the foreseeable future, according to tech giant Bosch.

Speaking at the Sapphire trade show, Bosch global mobile architect Sascha Markus said IoT will be one of the biggest trends driving new innovations in industries like manufacturing.

"In five years we'll see new device types, watches, glasses, anything you can imagine that will all be connected and sharing and bringing information to users," he said. "This is great as connected devices have the potential to help our users and customers in a lot of ways."

Markus highlighted Bosch's success deploying Android smartglasses to its warehouse workers as proof of the industry potential for wearables and connected devices.

"We saw in our productions sites we had lots of paper processes and had 150 SAP installations. With this set-up, our workers just had desktops and were still printing off work orders, going to the warehouse and physically scanning the items there, this isn't efficient," he said.

"We thought 'lets add smartglass to increase productivity and remove the paper process'. We now provide workers with a smartphone and an Android smartglass to execute the process in the warehouse and have seen great success. Augmented reality is the next step in industries like this."

Markus added the company was only able to reap the benefits of the smartglasses as it chose to leverage business and productivity focused SAP services.

"We're using glasses made for industrial use. The key for us was to focus on service-oriented architecture, this is what SAP provided," he said.

"Because we already had the analytics and management platforms and a good warehouse management system in place, we managed to implement the system in two weeks."

He said despite smart devices and IoT's potential benefits, there are still significant challenges hampering widespread adoption outside of industry.

"We have challenges ahead of us. Right now things like smartphones and pretty much all smart devices are proprietary and only communicate with a select number of other devices. If you want a fully connected environment now you have to go to one supplier," he said.

"This needs to change if we want a fully connected world and general adoption. We need to work together to achieve IoT and create industry standards. It's only then that there will be high adoption. That's why we started an alliance to create a standard that will let them all talk to each."